Kristian Ranta

Kristian Ranta, also known as Kride, was the guitarist of the Finnish melodic death metal band Norther, until their break up in 2012. Kristian has composed most of Norther's best known songs including Frozen Angel, and is also credited for renaming the band (originally called Requiem). Ranta has played the guitar on all the band's full-length albums, the most recent being ''Circle Regenerated'' (2011) and ''N'' (2008), and contributed clean vocals to the ''Solution 7 EP'', ''Till Death Unites Us'', the ''No Way Back EP'' and ''N''. He has formed an experimental side project named Gashouse Garden with Children of Bodom drummer Jaska Raatikainen.

Kristian has also acted, along with his band mates, in a Finnish film called ''Vares 2''. Norther and Kristian also composed a title track for this film called Frozen Angel, for which a music video, featuring images of the movie, was made. He was also interviewed in a TV documentary about Finnish heavy metal bands - ''Promised Land of Heavy Metal'' - (2009).

Kristian was a co-founder and CEO of a Finnish diabetes technology company called Mendor until he left the company in November 2015.

Later in 2015 Kristian co-founded a company called Blooming to work on stress reduction at workplaces. Blooming was featured in TechCrunch in March 2016. Kristian was also featured in the biggest newspaper in Finland called Helsingin Sanomat in the summer of 2016 (text in Finnish).

With the lead of Kristian as its CEO, Blooming changed its name in 2016 to Meru Health and focused on building a digital treatment solution for depression and anxiety. In 2018 Meru Health got accepted to a famous startup accelerator in Silicon Valley called Y Combinator and has appeared on number of mainstream media publications such as TechCrunch, INC and MobiHealthNews.

In 2018 Kristian started his own featured blog on Forbes magazine. Provided by Wikipedia